Gerald Kersh - Nightshade And Damnation

[dem bones]

Gerald Kersh - Nightshade And Damnation (Coronet, 1969)

Harlan Ellison - Introduction: Kersh, The Demon Prince

The Queen Of Pig Island
Frozen Beauty
The Brighton Monster
Men Without Bones
"Busto Is A Ghost, too Mean to Give us A Fright!"
The Ape And The Mystery
The King Who Collected Clocks
Bone For Debunkers
A Lucky Day For The Boar
Voices In The Dust Of Annan
Whatever Happened To Colonel Cuckoo?

Blurb:
WAKE UP, damn YOU!

See them all around:
zombies, devils, demons, slippery crawling things that are silent when they move, yet poison the air as they pass ...
Men without bones and creatures without faces, scuttling through the night and destroying all your dreams ...
Dreams into nightmares, humans into polter­geists, four-legged pets into ten-legged monsters ...
How much longer will you be able to deny them? How much can your civilised mind stand? If you can't beat them (and you can't), don't try. Just keep the midnight oil alive.

An almost 'greatest hits' selection. Personally I'd have liked The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy, Comrade Death, Fantasy Of A Hunted Man and The Crewel Needle, the latter because I don't have a copy anywhere and it sounds well up to scratch.

Men Without Bones: Professor Goodbody, Anthropologist, is relentlessly pursued by little fat men without bones who wish to do him harm. It began when he and Dr. Yeoward made a startling discovery while researching South American native folk-tales in "the rottenest jungle in the world." Investigating a plateau in this wilderness shunned by the Ahu people as 'the bad place' - according to legend, in ancient times it was visited by strange beings who descended from the sky in a ball of flame - they discover a space ship. Studying the site, Dr. Yeoward retrieves a star chart plotting the route from Mars to Earth. That night the jellyfish-alikes attack the camp intent on killing the few remaining survivors of the expedition by sucking them to death. Prof. Goodbody shoots one and performs an impromptu autopsy before the terrible being dissolves to slime. When his colleague succumbs to a snake bite, Goodbody battles on to the nearest port where he is taken for a lunatic.

Frozen Beauty: Natural cryogenics in Siberia. A Russian doctor fleeing the Bolsheviks shelters in a cave. Awaiting him, a grim tableau of card-players frozen solid around a table. It is a similar story with their horses and further inside the lair, a little girl, petrified by the cold while playing with her dolly. The doctor builds a fire. And the little girl ... blinks.

"Busto Is A Ghost, too Mean to Give us A Fright!": Fearsome Pio Busto - poison of choice red Lisbon, "a terrible drink ... otherwise known as lunatic broth or red lizzie" - rents out rooms in the most decrepit of New Oxford Streets slums, and God help those poor sods who can't meet their week's rent. But when his mongrel dog Ouif is hit by a car, we see a more sensitive side to his nature. He offers the vet £100 to save the mutt, only to be told there is nothing he or anyone else can do, and it would be a mercy to end the creature's suffering. Busto takes up his gun. Kersh's narrative then veers off into an account of a horrifying incident at 'Fort Flea' in North Africa, where a regiment were feasted upon by swarms of blood-suckers.

[dem bones]

The Brighton Monster: Men Without Bones is arguably better regarded, but this is my pick of a very strong selection to date. What is the connection between Sato, a heavily tattooed Japanese wrestler, last known whereabouts Hiroshima, August 1945, and the subject of the fabulously named Reverend Arthur Titty's eighteenth century pamphlet: Strange Monster Captured Near Brightonhelmstone in the County of Sussex on August Sixth in the Year of Our Lord 1745?

The Ape And The Mystery: Leonardo da Vinci learns the secret behind La Gioconda's enigmatic smile. Some things are better left unknown. Echo the ventriloquist's nightmarish run in with the extraordinarily horrible dummy is way more fun than this one.